1 Vocal Development
The most useful part of this book will certainly be the exercises, for it is the exercises that matter. It is by doing them, and doing them regularly, that you will increase the physical awareness of your voice and give yourself the freedom to experience the resonances of which you are capable.
The exercises laid out at the back are a synthesis of those in the main part of the book and, as by the end I hope you will have experienced a new awareness of your voice, they will act as a guide and reminder of what you will have found to be necessary and useful to you.
But it is important that you do not look on exercises only as a reassurance of physical prowess. They are a preparation, both physical and for your whole self, which will enable you to respond instinctively to any situation. It is only if, as an actor, you are in a state of total readiness that you are free to be part of the action, which is new every moment. In other words, you do not have to come out of the situation to reflect and think 'How can I do this?'; you do it at the moment the action arises, because the voice is so free. Exercises should not make you more technical, but more free.
You will also find that doing exercises leads you to know something more of yourself and your attitude towards acting.
It seems to me that the development of the voice goes through three stages. You do exercises for relaxation, breathing and for the increased muscularity of the lips and tongue, all of which free you and open up the voice almost as you do them. You find more power with less effort, more incisiveness, and you hear notes in the voice that you did not know you had, and which are surprising. This is the first stage, and an encouraging one. It is important because it gives proof of the potential sound you have. You can hear the benefit of the exercises on texts which you use to stretch the voice and make it more responsive.
When you come to the second stage, that of applying this freedom and flexibility to the work which you are presenting to an audience, then the business becomes more complex. You will very likely find that the vocal tensions and limitations you normally have are an integral part of the tensions and limitations you have in communicating as an actor, and are therefore not easy to discard. You are therefore forced to question and adjust your whole acting process, for you cannot consider voice by itself, only in relation to the job you are doing.
For example, some actors have an overbalance of head resonance.
This comes from tension in the back of the palate and tongue which does not allow the chest notes to reinforce the sound. It also comes, I think, from a mistaken idea that that is where the sound should be placed. This concentration of energy in the head resonators gives the voice a metallic quality which carries well, the actor hears it in his head as having bite and edge, qualities on which he feels he can rely, and his ear is accustomed to that sound. In fact, to the listener's ear the texture of the voice is restricted, because it is thin and lacks the warmth that the chest notes could give it — its wholeness — and so its possibilities are narrowed. By taking this particular tension away, rooting the voice down, and finding the energy in a different place with less conscious effort, the voice will have much greater flexibility and freedom; it will also have more conviction because it will be more complete. All this the actor may feel when doing the exercises on his own, but when faced with the situation of the audience it is extremely difficult for him to believe that he is being as positive when he is not feeling the usual effort. He feels lost without the tension on which he has relied, because this tension was part of his emotional make-up and his way of committing himself to an audience, and perhaps of convincing himself. It then becomes more than a simple question of voice, for the rooted voice is stronger and more positive - it calls into question your judgment of the amount of energy needed to communicate, and where that energy should be found. Whatever the problem, it takes time to believe that freedom works.
It is obviously difficult to talk about voice in general terms, because the voice is absolutely personal to the individual. It is the means by which you communicate your inner self, and there are many factors, both physical and psychological, which have contributed to its making, so that the danger is that you will interpret instructions subjectively. You therefore have to discover a very firm basis of understanding, a common understanding, a norm, and this you can do by the experience of exercises and the precise movements of muscles, and their effect on the voice.
Tensions and limitations always come from a lack of trust in yourself: either you are over-anxious to communicate or to present an 'mage, or you want to convince an audience of something about yourself. Even the experienced actor often limits himself by relying too much on what he knows works and is effective, and this in itself is a lack of freedom. Certainly, an actor has to find what means he can rely on to communicate to his audience, that is part of the craft, but if he holds on to the same means to find his energy and truth he then becomes predictable. He fixes, and what started as something which was good can end so easily as a manner - the same way of dealing with a situation. An actor with an interesting voice who uses it
well can still end up with his audience knowing how he is going to sound, so there is no surprise. This has a lot to do with lack of trust, because it takes trust to start each part with a clean slate, as it were — in other words, with no preconceived ideas of how it should sound, no holding on to the voice that you know. It is only by being in a state of readiness that the voice will be liberated.
This second stage, therefore, often involves discarding what is comfortable. It involves persevering with the exercises so that we learn about energy — where our energy lies and how to use it. All unnecessary tension is wasted energy. More than this, if you do not use enough energy you fail to reach your audience, but if you use too much you disperse it by using too much breath, bursting out on consonants, by being too loud, and so on. The audience then tends to recoil, because you are pushing the energy, manufacturing it, and not finding it within yourself, and this has to do with pushing out emotion and underlining what you feel. In real life you step back from the person who is over-anxious, over-enthusiastic, the person who gets you in a corner when he talks to you, and it is the same with the actor's relationship with his audience. What you are attempting to find is the right physical balance in the voice, which of course helps the acting balance — the more often you find it, the easier it is to recall it. It is in persevering with the voice over a period of time that you get the essential awareness of the separateness of muscles and what they contribute, and this is when voice finds its own intrinsic quality, involving no effort. It is a two-way process, and a rather marvellous one; you know what you want to communicate, but in the physical act of making sound, meanings take on a new dimension.
In short, you are looking for the energy in the muscles themselves, and when you find that energy you do not have to push it out, it releases itself. You do not then have to push your emotion out, it is released through the voice. When you can tie this up with your intentions as an actor you have found what you are after, a unity of physical and emotional energy, and you are then at the third stage. Here the aim is only to simplify. Quite suddenly the very simple exercises take on a particular purpose, and you are round again to the view that the straightforward exercises for relaxation, breathing and the muscularity of the lips and tongue are your basis and your security.
So, though in the end getting the best out of your voice is a straight matter of doing exercises, you often have to go through a complex phase to know why the exercises are needed. Because you cannot divorce voice from communication, you have to sort out the problems and needs of communication before the exercises can be effective. And communication to an audience is complex and elusive,
its validity changes as you change and with the different material you are using. The aim is always clarity, but you can fog that clarity by allowing too much feeling through, by over-explaining, by presenting what you think you ought to present, what you think is interesting, that is to say, by selecting the part of yourself which you think is most acceptable. And you can fog it by tension, which is always a matter of compensating for something you think you lack — size, for instance. A slightly-built actor will very often push his voice down in a false way in an effort to get weight, but this only limits and diminishes, and he has to learn to trust in his own size. You continually signal what you would like people to see of you, and when you signal that you feel, that you understand, then you fog real communication.
I think one of the greatest fears of the actor is that of not being interesting. This really need never be a fear because everyone is interesting in that he is himself. When you get to the point which says 'This is me; it will change, and perhaps improve, but this is me at this moment', then the voice will become open. Certainly, the more integrated the actor is the more he realizes the value of specific exercises. That is why I said that our common ground was the experience of the voice through the movement of muscles, and each person has to apply this experience for himself. The more you do this, the more objective you will become.
The primary object then is to open up the possibilities of the voice, and to do this you have to start listening. I do not mean listening to the external sound of your voice; I mean very specially listening for the vocal resource you have, listening forwhat you as a person require to say, and listening for what the text contains And this takes time and stillness. You are conditioned so much by what you think good sound should be, by what you would like the result to be, which is often too logical anyway, that you limit the range of notes you use and stop your instinctive responses. You get ready with your sound before you have really listened to what is being said to you, or before you have really listened to what your text says. This again is a form of anxiety which makes you rush into things. You have to learn to listen afresh in every moment, and to keep questioning what you are saying; only by doing this can you keep the voice truly alive.
A great deal of voice work is done on what, to my mind, is a negative basis - this is, 'correcting' the voice, making it 'better', with all the social and personal implications of that word, somehow making it seem that you are not quite good enough. Emphasis has been on ironing out not-quite-standard vowels, neatening consonants, projecting the voice, and getting a full, consistent tone, with the underlying inference that there is a way that you should sound, a way of
speaking lines. Naturally, the voice must be able to give pleasure, and it can only do so if it is well tuned and rhythmically aware, and this involves well-defined vowels and consonants. Additionally, however, you must always build on the vitality which is there in your own voice, increase your awareness of its music so that it can fulfil the demands of a text, and make the vowels and consonants more accurate because that way you are alive to the accuracy of the meaning. A corrective attitude to voice reduces the actor to using it 'right', and keeps him within the conventional tramlines of good speech. This way it cannot be accurate to himself. It is also inhibiting, and makes much acting dull. You want to open the voice out so that its music can match the music of what you are saying, and make the vowels and consonants sharp so you can point the meaning.
I think many young, interesting actors shy away from working on voice because of this restrictive attitude. Quite understandably they do not want something so personal interfered with and sounding well produced; they distrust it for they fear their individuality will be lost, and in any case it is not relevant to what they feel. This kind of attitude is a relic of all the associations of class which attached to English speech, thankfully now becoming less significant. If you have any sort of regional accent or slightly 'off-gent' speech, subconsciously there is the fear that if you make it standard you will lose some of your vitality, and consequently some of your virility, and this is a very real barrier. It may also seem as though you are betraying your background. Nevertheless, if you hold on to a way of speaking for the wrong reason you limit your voice, and therefore you limit what it can convey. If you limit it consciously, then the voice will not be quite true, and it follows that the acting will not be quite right. It is as crucial as that. Limitations keep the audience attention on the actor and not on the character he is playing.
As you can see, it is a delicate balance to keep the essential truth of your own voice, yet make it large and malleable enough to use it for feelings which are other than your own and which have to be projected, whether to a large auditorium, as in the theatre, or in a smaller way for a TV or film camera. To get this balance you have to work in two ways, technically and imaginatively, the one reaffirming the other. Therefore you have to use all the methods at your disposal, even if they sometimes seem contradictory, because you are working from two ends — but you will meet in the middle.
Singing, of course, is an excellent way to stretch the voice. It strengthens the breathing and makes you find and use resonances in the chest and head. Most importantly, I think, it gives you a useful experience of feeling sound bouncing off, an effortlessness in which the emotions are not involved too much. Useful because you so often push emotions too much, and you need the experience of being
able to allow the voice to come out freely. However, the actor must never think of his voice as an instrument, as this implies something exterior to himself with which he can do things, and then it will be false. Naturally, it needs to sound interesting, but interesting and remarkable in so far as what you are saying is interesting and remarkable and not as an end in itself. Again it is a balance you are dealing with, of having feeling but at the same time being able to let go of it. I think it is important to recognize the difference between training the voice for singing and training it for acting, because many misconceptions can arise about where sound should be placed. For both you need to open up everything you have, but for singing you convey your meanings through the particular disciplines of sound — the sound is the message — so that the energy is in the resonance. For the actor, on the other hand, the voice is an extension of himself and the possibilities are as complex as the actor himself, and so it means a basic difference in the balance of sound and word. For the actor, ultimately it is the word that must impinge, as it is the word which contains the result of his feeling and his thought; it is therefore in the word that his energy must lie, and in the million ways of stressing, lengthening and inflecting it. This is why an overbalance of head tone does not communicate to an audience — it does not reinforce the word.
Your voice must be accurate to yourself, so it needs to reflect not only what you think and feel but also your physical presence. Because you are dealing with words that are not your own, that come off a «printed page, you have to be continually finding ways to make them your own. Obviously, all the work you do in searching for the intellectual and emotional motive will inform the words and make the speech alive, but you can further this process by becoming as sensitive as possible to the physical make-up of your voice in relation to your body. As you open the breathing out in the base of the ribs and the diaphragm and stomach, so you are able to feel where the sound starts, and you can root it down, as it were, so that the whole frame of the body is involved with and is part of the sound. This is its physical presence. Doing strenuous and free movement with voice exercises can give quite extraordinary results, as it takes the concentration into a different area, helps to relate the voice to the body as a whole, and gives you experience of quite different vocal textures. An actor can be working subtly with a lot going on in his mind and imagination, but unless the voice is rooted down it will make no complete statement, and to some degree will negate what is interesting.
Just as breathing is a vital function, so the need to make sound to convey our needs is vital. Words came about because of the physical needs to express a situation. Think for a moment of expressions like
'my heart came into my mouth', 'my hair stood on end' or 'my hackles rose' — these are atavistic phrases which tell you something of your response to fear and of being attacked. You have these sensations when you are frightened and certain anatomical changes take place. You have physiological reactions to all emotions and states of being. Your skin and hair, for instance, behave quite differently when you are feeling good to when you are unhappy or tired.
The words are rooted with the breath. I do not believe this can be achieved by a lot of patter exercises because they are meaningless and do not in any way contribute to your awareness of the physical root of words or their possibilities. It always seems to me a waste of time to work on any text that is second-rate; the better the text the more possibilities will open up.
It is difficult to do voice exercises on your own, partly because of the indecision of what to do, and also because of the discouraging feeling that you may be doing them wrong. Just the responsibility of doing them makes for tension. However, if the exercises are set out it is not so difficult to follow instructions, and I think those appearing in this book are foolproof. Obviously you will not be able to go through all of them each time, but I shall work through the exercises in the next two chapters because it is important that you understand the progression that is there. For example, the relaxation and breathing on the floor takes a good deal more time than when sitting or standing, because it takes time to feel the openness, so it may not be possible to do these particular exercises every time you practise, but if you understand the principle it helps through the other exercises. It is much better to do half an hour a day, and stick to that period, than feel you have to do an hour and then not do it because you are unable to find the time.
Everyone is at different stages and has varying needs, yet all basically require doing something from each section, for the exercises are interrelated. As the exercises become easier so the process becomes quicker and you can be more selective as to what to do to achieve your result.
As you will see, the exercises operate at different levels. At times you need to use them purely as exercise to make you ready for work. At other times you are conscious of them tying up with deeper problems which they help to solve. In any case the act of doing them is always productive.